The state of Israel’s heinous conduct must not be seen solely as a “Jewish problem”.

It arises from a tragic, universally inhumane capacity to privilege power over humanity, and greed, tribalism and exceptionalism over human decency. Action is urgently required. But it cannot further entrench grossly self-serving propaganda. Nor can it justify the dehumanising of any one group in our human family by another.

To reduce antisemitism in Australia, education is critical. In some sectors, criticism of Israel’s current far-right government has indisputably allowed ancient vile prejudices to be unleashed. However, when fresh demands are made by Zionist lobbyists to further control how Australians should perceive and discuss Israel’s obliteration of Palestinian lives, culture and nationhood — and when this is done in the name of “combatting” antisemitism — we have a shared problem that goes beyond free speech to the heart of how morality and ethics are understood in this country.

The success of lobbyists globally in controlling mainstream reporting on Israel/Palestine has allowed the situation to disintegrate to the point where Israel now acts with blatant indifference to international laws governing human rights and protections. This is exceptionalism on steroids. It serves no-one well.

Since the blazingly stupid, cruel, terrifying actions of the corrupt Hamas, supported for years as “controllable” by Benjamin Netanyahu via Oman, the Gaza Strip, with its former 98% literacy rate and passionate emphasis on education and culture has become uninhabitable. Life there is unsustainable. Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, in the New York Times of 15 July 2025, wrote, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

The illegal Jewish settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, established and protected violently, grow in number and confidence. Yet still the silencing of any protest of Israel’s response to the terrible events of 7 October 2023, under the guise of such protest being “antisemitic” or “supporting terrorism”, has become a display of ideological authoritarianism that has to be rejected.

For decades, the known suffering of the millions of stateless Palestinians living under Israeli militarised occupation has flown under the radar of the world’s media. It continues to be under- or misreported. This is partly due to continuing Western myths that Israel functions as a democratic, rather than as an apartheid, fully militarised, state. It also rests on historical, unforgivable indifference by Western nations and legacy media to those regarded as “Arabs”.

An entire nation, race or culture cannot be suppressed, dispossessed or “cleansed” without consistent denigration and dehumanisation. That happened over centuries to Jews. It is happening today to Palestinians.

Ensuring that Israel is neither sanctioned nor isolated for its actions is the primary task of Zionist lobbyists, represented in Australia by powerful organisations and the Advance Australia-associated “special envoy to combat antisemitism”, Jillian Segal.

These individuals and groups are vigilant on how and to what effect the term “antisemitism” is wielded. Not solely, it seems, to fight the prejudices and harm caused by the long, ugly, Christian-led history of antisemitism that I will discuss in Part Two of this article, but rather to protect the state of Israel through an exclusively ultra-Zionist lens.

The lobbyists – globally as well as in Australia – insist on a highly particularised, self-serving definition of antisemitism. Any protest about Israel, any support for Palestinians, is positioned as endangering Jews. All Jews. And must be suppressed.

Keeping the focus on antisemitism is strategic and profoundly cynical. It keeps not just anti-Jewish (all too real) suffering in the headlines. It successfully distracts from, and denies, what is being done in the name of the “Jewish state”. It denies Israel’s power as a state where non-Jews are, at best, second-class citizens. Where core contemporary principles of diversity and inclusion are trashed. And where Palestinians are herded, dispossessed, annihilated, as though they were indeed the “human animals” Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir repeatedly claims them to be.

Israel is now the world’s eighth largest exporter of weapons. It is widely understood to possess weapons of mass destruction. It benefits from intense engagement in shared regional interests with the US, exporter of 43% of the world’s weapons. In the US, “antisemitic” accusations already exist as precursors to the rigid controls in how Israel is to be perceived and defended, ambitiously proposed by Segal for Australia.

The ambitions of the ultra-Zionist “Jewish lobby” reach far into Australian public life. In the Sydney Morning Herald of 11 July 2025, journalist Chip le Grand wrote, in relation to Segal’s “plan” to combat antisemitism: “If the special envoy’s recommendations are to be given practical effect, the definition should serve as a guide to identifying antisemitism [a view highly contested] but not a prescriptive code for what can and can’t be said or who can come to Australia. If the definition is applied rigidly, no Arab person who has grown up under Israeli occupation in the West Bank or Gaza could reasonably hope to pass the Segal test for Australian residency.”

This quote is revelatory. It makes clear that Palestinians (disrespectfully described as “Arab person[s]”) would automatically be excluded from “Australian residency” under Segal’s plan. Further, the lobbyists Segal speaks for, and to whom right-wing politicians and media eagerly listen, wish to influence multiple issues via their delegates, including the reporting of the conduct of the IDF in Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank. This further conflates the political ideology of Zionism with the heterogenous experiences of Jewishness, again intensifying the labelling of any objection, coming from Jews and non-Jews alike, as, yes, “antisemitic”.

That Australia’s knee-jerk “conservative” media should energetically support an extreme right-wing government in Israel is no surprise. Nor are we surprised by the irony that this same media so vocal in depriving First Nations of a Voice now eagerly amplify the “special claims” of Israel. Religio-nationalist governments elsewhere, though, or just the usual authoritarian fanatics, have not had the opportunity additionally to silence dissent or even fair analysis of their conduct by naming it antisemitic, summoning up centuries of shame and guilt, and throwing a cloak over behaviour that does nothing but prove some humans from any and all cultures are capable of evil, as well as good.

In the process, the Netanyahu/Smotrich/Ben-Gvir triumvirate, plus their apologists, discredit centuries of deeply humane contributions from Jewish philosophers and thinkers, including in the immediate post-Holocaust era.

This intensifies the need to better understand the actual history of antisemitic harm which can get lost when any government — our own included — lets itself be pushed to support an unprecedented manipulation of what can and cannot be analysed or even said, for no obvious reason other than to shield one group of human beings doing immeasurable harm to another.

Even while Segal distances herself from the blatantly First Nations/immigrants/Muslim-bashing Advance Australia, where her husband of 45 years remains the second largest donor through a family trust, she also distances herself (successfully) from the hard and horrible truth that the conduct of the Israeli Government, and its enabling by a shameful majority of Western governments and all right-wing media, accelerates the entirely false belief that the “Jewish lobby” speaks for all Jews, and that Israel alone among nations may act with impunity against non-Jews, especially Muslims, Palestinians, Iranians, and “Arabs”.

The silencing of sorrow and outrage through shouts of “antisemitic” is most politely described as coercive. It’s far more serious than that. Repressive silencing, along with the huge money involved in and made from war and “defence”, is allowing Israel to flourish outside all known and agreed international laws. These were, and are, designed to protect human rights for all, including that otherwise inalienable right to a homeland and life.

In this highly charged environment, any serious analysis of the Israeli status quo and particularly its tragic effect on Palestinian lives and cultural integrity, will continue to be condemned as an attack on all Jews. And, therefore, by the lobbyists’ definition, as antisemitic.

Many noble Israelis would strongly dispute this. Psychiatrist Dr Ruchama Marton is the founder of Physicians For Human Rights – Israel. In a recent interview reported in Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, she says: “The hard core of Zionism, as I understand it, is a land without Arabs, and that is what is in the offing now… The word ‘peace’ no longer exists. Peace is not something to aspire to anymore. We [Israelis} only want total victory, which is tantamount to total defeat.”

Zionism is a supremacist political ideology that denies the values of inclusion, diversity, and anti-racism. Removing my political commentator hat for a moment, I want to add one more note – not to excuse this shocking outbreak of bigotry and unspeakable harm, but to shine a dim light on it. The vigour with which harm is denied, and “victimhood” is claimed by Zionists in the name of antisemitism, perhaps shows more clearly than anything else could how successfully fellow feelings of care, empathy, mercy and justice can be repressed, along with guilt and shame. Those vital emotions would perhaps overwhelm many Zionists were they to acknowledge what far-right extremist governments (and their cynical Western enablers) have made of their dream of Eretz Israel. Yes, zealotry protects them. Also, religious and Messianic fundamentalism for some. For those who project their hatred most vehemently, though, who most aggressively deny the humanity of those they name “other”, there is indeed, as Dr Marton says, no protection from total defeat. Losing our care, we lose everything.

(Part Two of this article will look more closely at what antisemitism is, its near-2000-year-long sorrowful history, the betrayal by Zionism of Jewish and humanitarian principles in weaponising antisemitism; and the contribution we can consider from the teachings and example of the most famous Jew of all.)

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.